


Telling the Bees

by nickelsandcoats



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Memory Loss, Retirement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-23
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2018-01-26 05:15:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1676057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nickelsandcoats/pseuds/nickelsandcoats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"When the beekeeper dies, the bees must be told..." </p>
<p>After Sherlock's gone, John becomes their bees' new keeper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Telling the Bees

**Author's Note:**

> A sequel to [Quietude (In Memoriam for a Life We Dreamed of)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/280600).

John had first known something was wrong when Sherlock went out to tend the bees and didn’t come back inside for two hours, having missed tea. John, panicking slightly, pulled on his cardigan and went out in search of his missing husband, only to find him standing in the middle of the garden, bees buzzing all around him, holding the watering can in one hand and looking faintly puzzled. 

“Sherlock?”

Sherlock shook himself out of his daze, looking over at John in confusion. “What was I doing out here? Why do I have this?” he demanded, shaking the watering can at John.

John frowned, worry blossoming in the depths of his brain. He ruthlessly tamped it down as he asked, as calmly as he could, “Did you water the flowers?”

Sherlock immediately brightened. “Thank you! Always a conductor of light, you are!” And then he shuffled back to the house to fill the can, humming a bit under his breath.

John’s fingers tightened around his cane in an old, familiar pattern as he headed inside to prepare their tea.

 

John insisted on diagnostic tests when the little memory slips got worse, hoping that his instinct was wrong, but he was right. 

Sherlock’s voice was tight as he clutched the arm of the chair, “Yes, it runs in our family. My mother, and my brother. But Mycroft held on to quite a lot⎯the pills helped.”

Dr. Eversole leaned forward, her brown eyes crinkled in concern. Other than John, she was the only doctor Sherlock had ever been able to tolerate⎯her pragmatism and lack of shock at his deductions raised Sherlock’s opinion of her. “You know the pills can only help if it’s caught early enough, Sherlock.”

Sherlock’s mouth twisted. “I know,” he sighed. “Mycroft took them right away. I suppose I wanted to hold off the inevitable for as long as I could.”

“They won’t save everything. You know that, right? That we can’t cure this.”

“I remember how Mycroft was, at the end.” Sherlock glanced over at John, looked down at the small dents his nails left in the leather. “It wasn’t so bad.” He smiled bitterly. “One last experiment. The slow, steady decline of the infamous genius. Brought low by his own mind. Ironic, isn’t it?” He shoved himself up from his seat and left as quickly as he could, dashing his arm across his eyes.

The doctor looked at John, who was staring down at his clasped hands. “It will be hard for both of you. I’ll do what I can, but John, you know how he will take this.”

“He’s Sherlock Holmes,” John replied, pained. “He’ll take it as only he can.” He levered himself up, using his cane to support himself, shrugging off Dr. Eversole’s assistance. “He’ll go down fighting for every last scrap of himself he can keep, just like Mycroft did.” He took the script she offered, clutching it tightly with the hand holding his cane. “Thank you, Doctor.” He pretended to ignore the tears gathering in her eyes, just as she pretended to ignore his.

 

Sherlock was waiting on the bench just outside the building when John emerged, blinking into the sun. He stood without a word, took the script from John’s clenched fist, and started walking towards the chemist’s across the street, his shoulders hunched nearly to his ears. John opened the car door and sank down behind the wheel, letting his forehead rest against it for just a moment. He wished, more than ever, that Greg was still alive, that he could talk to his friend and figure out how the fuck he was supposed to _do this_. Greg had made it seem so easy to take of Mycroft, and Sherlock and John helped where and when they could, but Greg had done it mostly on his own. He had never talked about it, and John was certain Mycroft had never spoken about anything to Sherlock.

He jumped when Sherlock opened the passenger door, carefully folding himself into the seat. He stared straight ahead and murmured, “Home, John. Please.”

John nodded and turned the key. Neither of the spoke for the short drive home.

Sherlock, once he was inside and had taken his coat off without any of his usual flourish, stalked into the kitchen, opened the little white chemist’s bag and shook out the bottle. He opened it in one try, dumping a single white pill into his palm. John stared at it from across the table. Sherlock closed his hand around it, as if he were trying to strangle that innocuous, hated pill, and stalked over to the sink, scooping up the small glass they kept next to the sink and turning on the tap with a gentle touch of his wrist. He took the full glass, and without turning to face John, swallowed the pill and then drank the water in one long draught.

John watched, silently, as Sherlock’s Adam’s apple bobbed. He watched, silently, as Sherlock put the glass down without a clatter and brushed past him on his way to their bedroom. When Sherlock was gone, John painstakingly screwed the cap back onto the pill bottle and set it down with a quiet click on the table. He braced one hand on the table’s edge and pressed the other hard against his eyes, feeling them yield under the pressure.

When his eyes had stopped burning, he went to Sherlock.

“I’m scared,” Sherlock whispered against his chest as John curled around him protectively. They both were still dressed, lying on top of the duvet. 

“I am, too,” John admitted, thumb stroking slowly over Sherlock’s shoulder blade.

“You already lost me once. And now I’m going to make you watch it again.”

John said nothing. There was nothing he could say. There was no miracle he could beg for, no pleading to a God he didn’t believe in for Sherlock to live. He had seen what this had done to Mycroft, to Greg, in the end, and he didn’t know if he could be that strong. 

Sherlock’s tears were dampening John’s shirt as he choked out, “I can’t lose you, John. I can lose everything else, every other memory I have, but I can’t lose a moment of you. You are…everything, and I can’t lose that, I can’t I can’t I can’t.”

“I won’t let you,” John whispered fiercely, pressing a hard kiss to Sherlock’s silver curls. “I’ll remember for both of us.”

Sherlock’s hitched sobs finally slowed and then stopped, his breathing evening out as he drifted off to sleep. John held him as tightly as he could until his arms went numb, but he still didn’t let go. When he woke, it was dark and Sherlock had slipped away. John sat up, rubbing at his eyes, and smiled faintly when he heard the familiar sounds of Sherlock cursing at the stove over the strains of Bach from their speaker system. He wondered if this is how it had felt for Mycroft and Greg⎯these little islands of normality before the tide started washing away the shoreline.

 

The tide washed away their normality far more quickly than it had for Greg and Mycroft. Sherlock’s short-term memory just flickered at first, and through that first year, Sherlock was still so heartbreakingly aware of what was happening to him. He started writing himself notes to scatter about the house, so that he could jog his memory when he got “stuck,” as he euphemistically called it.

But only a year later, even the notes weren’t enough. John stopped leaving him alone in the house after Sherlock went outside with the bees again and ended up wandering almost all the way into town, where a kind neighbour had spotted Sherlock, red with sunburn, on the side of the road and brought him back home. 

John gave Sherlock the pills that weren’t really helping anymore and kept up as cheerful a stream of chatter as he could. Sherlock always wanted to hear about their cases (“Not just mine, John,” he’d exclaimed once in one of his better moments. “They were our cases. Yours and mine.”), and, on his good days, would tell John the things he’d left out of his retellings. John’s books of their cases that he’d published at Sherlock and Molly’s insistence ten years ago were well-thumbed at that point. Sherlock read them nearly religiously, eyes shining with joy because these were things he could remember. John had made sure he remembered their stories, that he remembered _them_ as they had been before…before this.

 

Two years after his diagnosis, even after he’d forgotten nearly everything else, Sherlock still knew three things: John, their cases, and his bees. John still retold their stories every day, even whispering them into Sherlock’s ear long after the other man had fallen asleep. John’s books were still left on every surface, there for Sherlock to pick up and read whenever he wanted (he’d panicked, once, after John had put them all back on the bookshelf as Sherlock had forgot where the books were kept. Although he’d remembered the next day, John still left them out for him so he wouldn’t have to remember where to look).

The bees were a constant source of delight for Sherlock, even though he could not remember how to care for them any longer. He watched John putter about the garden and the hives with every appearance of fascinated, avid delight, but once, John caught a flash of frustration as Sherlock tried to remember why John was smoking out a hive and carefully plucking a bit of honeycomb and offering it out for Sherlock to taste. John started explaining the job of beekeeping to Sherlock, his heart panging as he remembered Sherlock giving him these very same lessons twelve years ago. 

They went back in the house and John pulled out some of Sherlock’s beekeeping books, leaving them out along with John’s casebooks. Sherlock, with a little frown, traced his fingers along the spines as he picked each book up, before he brightened at one little faded red book. He sat down and started thumbing through it, reading with almost the same intensity John remembered from years ago. He smiled sadly and left Sherlock reading his book as he went to prepare their dinner.

 

The beginning of the end began with Sherlock’s little red beekeeping book. It was never far from him during the day⎯he kept it on the side table or draped it over the arm of the chair, spine up. Every afternoon, Sherlock would stare at the cover of his book, eyes carefully tracing the title, before opening it reverently and reading the same few pages, as near as John could tell, over and over again, until John would call him away for dinner and the book would be left, spine up, draped over the arm of the chair.

Once, when Sherlock was having a rare good day, John leaned over and took Sherlock’s hand in his own, tracing the veins under his thinning skin. “Why that book?” John asked, not meeting Sherlock’s eyes.

There was a long pause before Sherlock said, slowly, as if he were feeling out the words before uttering them, “I…it’s tradition, John, but I don’t remember why. I read it and the words just slip away.”

John held his hand for a few minutes longer, soothing Sherlock as he trembled a bit in half-remembered rage, at not being able to articulate, to recall and speak his ideas in his old quicksilver tongue. John’s heart broke anew as he waited for the storm to pass.

 

The end began with a story.

Sherlock curled into John’s chest that night, the same as he had every night for all the long years they’d been together, and whispered, “Tell me our story, John.”

And John did, speaking for what felt like hours. He started with their first meeting at Bart’s, their cases, their love, their life. His voice nearly gave out, he talked so long, pouring every last ounce of love into telling their story to the man he loved so he would remember it. 

And when John woke up the next morning, Sherlock was slowly growing colder in his arms, his chest still and his heart no longer thrumming. 

John let out one breath, then another, and pressed his lips so hard to Sherlock’s forehead that he thought he’d carry bruises on his lips for the rest of his days. 

Once the necessary calls had been made, and Sherlock had left home for the last time, John forced himself to get up and clear the tea he’d made for the men who had come to take his husband away. His eye caught on the little red beekeeping book, still draped over the arm of Sherlock’s chair. He picked it up carefully, placing his finger in the crease so he wouldn’t lose the page. He turned the book over and read both pages, brow furrowing at first, then clearing as he reached the end of the second page. He reached down and found a little scrap of paper, marking his place, before he sat the book carefully back on the side table. He pulled on a cardigan and slid on his shoes, and then went to find a piece of black cloth.

John felt a sense of peace settle over him as he carefully draped the black cloth over the hive. The bees stopped buzzing for a moment, the air grown thick with their sudden silence. John cleared his throat, and stated, “Sherlock’s gone. He’s gone, and I have to tell you. That’s what the book said. You have to tell the bees their keeper’s died, and then put black cloth on the hive. ‘It’s tradition,’ he said. That’s what he was trying to tell me, so that I wouldn’t be alone. If I tell you he’s gone, and I drape the cloth, that means you won’t leave the hive.” He stopped, trying to swallow down the lump in his throat that was choking him. “Please,” he started, “please don’t leave. I don’t think I could bear losing this, too.”

He turned on his heel, as he’d done all those years ago the first time Sherlock had died, and walked back into the house. Only after he’d shut the door did he realise he had left his cane propped against Sherlock’s chair. As he smiled a bit at the irony, the bees began buzzing again. John leaned his head back against the closed door and listened to them for a moment, before he forced himself away. He had more calls to make, and a funeral to plan.

 

The bees came to the funeral. 

They gathered in thick bunches on the surrounding headstones, huddled together in silence.

When John was finally able to tear himself away from staring at Sherlock’s name, the bees remained in place, still waiting.

John went home alone.

The next morning, he woke late and stared at the ceiling, trying in vain to ignore how empty the bed felt. He finally got up and went through the motions of his life, making tea by habit and drank it staring out the back window. He couldn’t quite see the hive from here, but no bees were buzzing around the roses. With a heavy heart, he dumped the remains of his tea down the drain and went outside to check the hive.

They were back, their buzzing subdued as if they were still in mourning, but they were there. John’s knees gave out and he sank down to the bench he’d had installed once Sherlock’s memory started to go, beaming through his tears. “Thank you,” he said, over and over again as the bees buzzed slowly around him. One landed on his outstretched hand for a moment, tickling his palm, before it lumbered away again. John sat out there, surrounded by Sherlock’s bees, for hours as every bee from the hive came to alight on him for a moment before joining its sisters again. 

John smiled when the last one flew away. He stretched out his hands, twirling his wedding ring around his finger, and cleared his throat. As their new keeper, he owed it to the bees to share his story. And so he began, as he had for Sherlock’s last night:

“We began in St. Bart’s Hospital, where Sherlock deduced every last detail of my life and then changed it forever with one simple address…”

**Author's Note:**

> The bees needing to be told that their keeper has died or they'll leave the hive is a part of beekeeper lore. Bees have attended their keeper's funerals, too. [This article ](http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=bJdGAAAAIBAJ&sjid=oP0MAAAAIBAJ&pg=5174%2C1119343) explains the tradition and describes two keeper's funerals that were attended by their bees.


End file.
